


The Saints Can't Help Me Now

by lit_chick08



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season 2 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit_chick08/pseuds/lit_chick08
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Elena thinks she’s the only one who wanted him to come back; she often wonders if it would have been better if he had just stayed away</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Saints Can't Help Me Now

He comes back on a Thursday, entering the Grill and striding towards the bar as if he hasn’t been missing in action for the past six weeks. Elena is standing at a table with Caroline, Stefan, Damon, and Alaric when he enters, her back to the door, and it isn’t until she sees the way Caroline recoils that she turns. 

“I can’t believe he came back here,” Caroline spits through clenched teeth.

Elena thinks he looks older, as if he has aged ten years since the terrible night at the lake house. There was a time when she knew Tyler’s face as well as her own, the result of an entire lifetime together; but their friendship had withered long before he had lead that psycho Brady to her. 

There is something in the breadth of his shoulders, in the new muscles evident beneath his thin t-shirt that reminds Elena of Mason. She wonders if it is genetic, if all werewolves eventually end up shaped like Tyler. Stefan never told her what happened to Mason and she isn’t sure she ever wants to know. Mason may have tried to kill Stefan and Damon, may have fallen for Katherine’s lies and tried to use the moonstone to get what he wanted, but all Elena could think of when remembering Mason was being eight-years-old and having the slain werewolf teach her and Tyler how to skateboard.

Damon is saying something vaguely threatening, Alaric telling him to keep it down, but Elena doesn’t hear it. She just wants to know why he is back, where he was, and why he left with Jules.

But she doesn’t go up to the bar to ask him. Instead, she tucks herself firmly against Stefan’s side and forces herself to focus on what is being said.

* * *

Once upon a time, Elena Gilbert had been Tyler Lockwood’s best friend. They had climbed trees together, played tag on the Lockwood property, and wrestled in the Gilbert living room. There had been a time when Elena held all of Tyler’s secrets and would suffer penalty of death before revealing a single one.

But people always seemed to forget that.

* * *

She finds a perfect seashell in her locker resting on her physics book. There are still grains of white sand on it, and it makes her long to be anywhere but Mystic Falls, Virginia.

Tyler is in study hall, slumped in a chair near the magazine racks, and it is almost as if he had never left. She sits across from him, setting the shell on the table between them.

“You don’t want it?” he asks, his voice almost hoarse with disuse.

“Where’d you go?”

“California.”

They don’t say anything for the rest of the period. When the bells ring, Elena palms the shell, slipping it into her pocket as Tyler is swallowed in the crowd.

* * *

After her parents died, Elena couldn’t sleep. The doctor gave her pills but she always dreamed of them, of that terrible night on Wickery Bridge. She tried Jenna’s chamomile tea, Sheila Bennett’s scented candles, Bonnie’s white noise machine, and Caroline’s soothing music, but nothing worked.

Tyler came empty-handed, perching on the edge of her bed and just talking. He talked more than she could ever remember him talking, his voice remarkably calming, and it lulled her into the first four consecutive hours of sleep she had since waking up in the hospital.

He called her at bedtime every night for two months that summer.

She never said thank you.

He wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.

* * *

Caroline swears she’ll never forgive Tyler but Elena can tell she misses him. Their world offers so few allies that a multitude of sins get forgiven every day in the desperation for connection. Even at her angriest and most betrayed, Elena has never been able to hate; it is not her nature and she never wants it to be. She wants to tell Caroline that, if she can forgive Damon for what he did to Jeremy, she can forgive Tyler for his hesitation.

But Caroline’s nature is constantly changing and Elena has trouble gauging her anymore.

Elena has never asked what happened between them before everything went to hell. It is an unspoken agreement of their friendship post-vampirism; they no longer discuss boyfriends or potential boyfriends. Their conversations now revolve around monsters and blood and all the things that they used to think existed solely in episodes of _True Blood._

Caroline is dating Matt and Elena suspects they are happy. When she talks to Matt in calculus, Elena can see how content he is with Caroline, and she wishes she could wish them well.

As John is so found of telling her, there are no happy endings when humans love vampires.

* * *

When they were fourteen, Caroline had a crush on Tyler. She had enlisted Elena to find out what Tyler thought of her, if he would be interested in being her boyfriend. Elena had tried to beg it off, not wanting to be put between her two friends, but Caroline was persistent and Elena was never good at saying no.

She cornered Tyler after gym class, dutifully asking how he’d feel about having Caroline as a girlfriend; he stared at her for a moment before rolling his eyes and declaring he couldn’t imagine dating Caroline, who loved the sound of her own voice too much.

Elena lied and told Caroline he already liked Tina Fell.

She tried not to feel responsible when Caroline stole Tina’s jeans out of her gym locker later in the week.

* * *

He shows up on her doorstep one night, his hands tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket, the mischievous smile Elena remembers from childhood on his face. There is something beautiful about him in the moon’s light, his dark features standing out against the opalescence of his skin.

“Want to go for a ride?”

Elena knows Stefan will be furious if she gets into a car with the werewolf who was nearly responsible for both of their deaths, but she also knows Stefan does not know the good in Tyler Lockwood, so she nods, calling out to Jenna where she’s going.

They end up at the quarry, sipping from a fifth of spiced rum he stole from his mother’s liquor cabinet. She knows he hates the taste of rum, that his drink is vodka; she is the one who wants sweetness in the liquor’s bite.

“You know your boyfriends killed Mason.”

She doesn’t like the detachedness of his voice or the way he refers to the Salvatores. But she doesn’t do his the disservice of denying it.

“You think it’s okay, what they did?”

She doesn’t. Even after what he did, she was never okay with killing Mason. But Damon hadn’t asked her opinion. “No, it wasn’t okay. It was just…”

“Just what?”

“Necessary.”

It is kill or be killed now.

Even in his grief, Tyler can understand that.

* * *

In the ninth grade, Tyler kissed her behind the concession stand at half-time.

She was coming out of the bathroom, straightening her cheerleading skirt, when she spotted Tyler in his uniform buying Gatorade. When she sidled up to him, trying to politely beg a sip, he had laughed, heading back towards the locker rooms. She had followed, playfully teasing him, when he turned and said he would give her a sip for a kiss. When she rolled her eyes and dismissed him, he held out the bottle anyway.

The liquid had barely passed her lips when he moved into her space and kissed her, his mouth firm against hers before pulling back, grinning, and disappearing into the field house, leaving her to press her fingers against her mouth.

That was the first time.

It wasn’t the last.

* * *

Damon says her bleeding heart will get them all killed. He forbids her from seeing Tyler again and threatens to have Bonnie seal her inside her house again. Stefan breaks up their screaming match, physically stepping between them as if they are about to come blows.

Later, when they are in his bedroom, Stefan asks her why she is spending time with Tyler now when, in all the time he has known her, he has never seen them exchange any more than pleasantries.

“We used to be close,” she offers, dancing along the edge of the truth with the precision of a prima ballerina.

Stefan nods, accepting the answer, but she sees the follow-up question in his eyes, wrestling to resist the urge to say it aloud.

 _How close?_ everything about him asks as their bodies meet in a rhythm older than time.

* * *

Tyler was the first person to ever make her come.

They were three weeks into whatever it was they were doing, taking advantage of her empty house; their parents were at his house for a meeting of the Founders’ Council and Jeremy was art class. In the Gilbert living room, he had pounced, tackling her to the couch, swallowing her giggles with his hot, demanding mouth.

When he popped open the button of her jeans, slipping his hand inside, she had tried to squirm away, embarrassed for him to find how wet she was, her pretty satin panties all but ruined by her desire. He drug his mouth down her neck, his tongue sliding against her skin in a way that made everything below her waist clench almost painfully.

“I’ll stop if you don’t like it,” he promised.

She wasn’t afraid she wouldn’t like it; she was more afraid she would.

His fingers were larger than hers, rougher against her flesh in a way that made her shiver. She gasped when he found her clit, pitching her hips upward so unexpectedly he almost fell off of the couch. Elena grabbed a pillow, burying her face in shame, but Tyler laughed, tugging it away and pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth.

When he entered her with one finger, she panted his name; when he added another, she felt a pinch of pain before her body yielded. He pressed his thumb against the throbbing part of her, establishing a rhythm easily, and Elena gripped his shoulders, struggling not to moan.

“Does it feel good?” 

All she could do was nod, biting her lip so hard she was certain it would bleed.

She came with a sharp cry, shaking from pleasure, her hands twisting into his polo shirt to keep him close. The excited spasm of muscle around his fingers made Tyler moan against her throat, his lips sliding to kiss every inch of skin he could reach.

Elena never wanted him to stop touching her.

She wished she would’ve told him.

* * *

He sneaks into her room on a Saturday night; she is wearing only her robe, prepared to wash the scent of the day away, when he slips inside with a stealth that surprises her.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses in shock, her voice sharp despite having no anger towards him.

“Visiting.”

“Sure you don’t mean breaking and entering?”

He smirks, shrugs with one shoulder. “Getting in the shower?”

She nods, tugging her ponytail loose, pulling pajamas out of the dresser. “If you want to wait – “

Tyler tugs off his shirt, tossing it onto her bed as if it belongs there. She tries not to stare at his chest and arms, more defined than she remembers them. She wants to work up the righteous indignation she uses to keep Damon at arm’s length but finds herself simply shaking her head.

“Ty…”

He toes off his boots, slipping out of his jeans and boxers in one fluid motion. She watches the lines of his back move as he enters the bathroom, locking the connecting door to Jeremy’s room and running the water. 

She hovers at the doorway as he draws back the curtain. “Tyler, I can’t – “

“Save your excuses,” he cuts in, unashamed in his nudity. When she didn’t move, his voice dropped an octave, the promise of pleasure dripping from his words as he requests, “Take off your robe.”

He presses her against the tile, the press of his body against hers reminding her of everything she forfeited years ago. She claws at him, trying to keep him close, trying to remember why they ever stopped doing this.

The water does little to muffle her cries as Tyler’s mouth works between her thighs, her fingers curled so tightly in his hair it would have hurt a normal person.

They are not normal people anymore.

* * *

In the Rewritten Life History of Elena Gilbert, Matt Donovan took her virginity after Winter Formal sophomore year. They left the dance early, returned to his empty house, and fumbled their way out of innocence.

This was the story Elena told Bonnie, Caroline, Jenna, and eventually Stefan. 

In the Actual Life History of Elena Gilbert, Tyler Lockwood laid her out on a picnic blanket in a clearing on the Lockwood property the summer before sophomore year. They undressed each other, comfortable with each other’s bodies after months of clandestine hookups, and, under the light of the full moon, made love for the first time. Afterward, Tyler pressed his lips to her breastbone and told her he loved her.

She couldn’t remember why or when it fell apart. But one day he told her he thought they should see other people, and she had been devastated but unsurprised. She had also wondered how he could break up with her if they had never formally been together.

It was easier to tell people the Rewritten Life History.

After Tyler, she needed to keep it simple.

* * *

Katherine is the one who blows it open. 

They are trying to interrogate her about Klaus and Elena makes a comment about how unalike they are. Katherine’s eyes narrow before spitting, “I don’t know about that. We both had the Salvatores fighting for us…We’ve both fucked a werewolf…”

Stefan looks stricken; Damon looks sickened; Caroline won’t even look at her.

She doesn’t bother denying it. There is no defense for what she has been doing and she knows this.

She is afraid for Tyler.

* * *

Once upon a time, Elena Gilbert had known the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, the truth and a lie.

Somewhere along the way, the truth stopped mattering.

Maybe it never mattered at all.

* * *

When it is over and Klaus is dead, Stefan tells her he is leaving. He kisses her forehead and she wishes she has something to say that will not sound like the empty platitudes they are.

Damon doesn’t tell her he is leaving. Instead, he appears drunk in her room, tells her that she is going to be the death of him, and then stumbles off into the night.

Caroline goes with Stefan. 

Tyler stays.

In the back of her mind, Elena always knew this is how the story would end.

* * *

No, that was a lie. 

This was _not_ how she thought the story would end.

This is how the story begins.


End file.
